"Schindler's List"

"Schindler's List" is described as a film about the Holocaust, but the Holocaust supplies the field for
the story, rather than the subject. The film is really two parallel character studies--one of a con man, the
other of a psychopath. Oskar Schindler, who swindles the Third Reich, and Amon Goeth, who represents
its pure evil, are men created by the opportunities of war.

In telling their stories, Steven Spielberg found a way to approach the Holocaust, which is a subject too
vast and tragic to be encompassed in any reasonable way by fiction. In the ruins of the saddest story of
the century, he found, not a happy ending, but at least one affirming that resistance to evil is possible
and can succeed.

The measure of Schindler's audacity is stupendous. His first factory makes pots and pans. His second
makes shell casings. Both factories are so inefficient they make hardly any contribution to the Nazi war
effort. A more cautious man might have insisted that the factories produced fine pots and usable
casings, to make them invaluable to the Nazis. Schindler's strategy as a con man is to always seem in
charge, to seem well-connected, to lavish powerful Nazis with gifts and bribes, and to stride, tall and
imperious, through situations that would break a lesser man. He also has the con man's knack of
disguising the real object of the con.

Some of the most dramatic scenes in the movie show Schindler literally snatching his workers from the
maw of death. He rescues Stern from a death train. Then he redirects a trainload of his male workers
from Auschwitz to his hometown in Czechoslovakia. The film as Spielberg made it is haunting and
powerful; perhaps it was necessary to have a one-dimensional villain in a film whose hero has so many
hidden dimensions. The ordinary man who was just "following orders" might have disturbed the focus of
the film--although he would have been in contrast with Schindler, an ordinary man who did not follow
orders.

"Schindler's List" gives us information about how parts of the Holocaust operated, but does not explain
it, because it is inexplicable that men could practice genocide. Or so we want to believe. In fact,
genocide is a commonplace in human history, and is happening right now in Africa, the Middle East,
Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The United States was colonized through a policy of genocide against native
peoples. Religion and race are markers that we use to hate one another, and unless we can get beyond
them, we must concede we are potential executioners. The power of Spielberg's film is not that it
explains evil, but that it insists that men can be good in the face of it, and that good can prevail.

The film's ending brings me to tears. At the end of the war, Schindler's Jews are in a strange land--
stranded, but alive. A member of the liberating Russian forces asks them, "Isn't a town over there?" and
they walk off toward the horizon. The next shot fades from black and white into color. At first we think it
may be a continuation of the previous action, until we see that the men and women on the crest of the
hill are dressed differently now. And then it strikes us, with the force of a blow: Those are Schindler's
Jews. We are looking at the actual survivors and their children as they visit Oskar Schindler's grave. The
movie began with a list of Jews being confined to the ghetto. It ends with a list of some who were saved.
The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf.